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London-based anti-fraud and fintech startup Salviol has raised €6.5 million in a Series A round led by Orange Growth Capital — money it plans to use to expand its European and international operations, and to drive sales.

TechCrunch has learned that Kreditech, an online finance startup that loans money to consumers who have little or no credit rating, is raising around $110 million in a Series C round of funding. One part of that has already been secured from one of the better known VCs and entrepreneurs in the startup world. €37.5 million ($44 million) is coming from investors that include Peter Thiel, one of the co-founders in PayPal and a prolific investor who has backed Facebook, Palantir and many others.

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We’ve identified 10 people who are shaping the way we send money. Whether they’re used to being in the public eye, or remain anonymous, we dug up some info on these impressive leaders in order to pay tribute to their hard work.

Startups have been riding the crest of a wave for a couple of years, but what is really being all the rage now are the startups that operate in the finance. It couldn’t be otherwise, since the banking system has revealed more than a fallacy during the financial crisis in 2008 that has roused the need of new methods of exchanging money for goods or services.

In a world of decreasing size and rapidly increasing technological development, the financial sector needs to keep up at the same pace. While physical supply chains have improved to keep track of the digital world, the financial supply chain has not kept pace.

The race toward real-time financial services involves a wide array of stakeholders and possibilities, ranging from common standardization to re-engineering underlying processes and protocols through blockchain technology.

For the global banking industry, blockchain adds an additional layer of security with relative simplicity and low cost, so it has potential value for any transaction that involves a confirmation layer within capital markets as a whole—across different asset classes. “No wonder the banks are interested in it,” concludes Zubairi.

The digital challenges and opportunities facing banks and credit unions are not unlike those faced by retailers more than a decade ago. Will the banking industry learn from those before them or face a similar fate similar to Blockbuster, Borders, Circuit City and others.

Banks and exchanges are all taking a keen interest in applying the blockchain, the record of asset ownership that underpins bitcoin, to financial markets. It mixes Silicon Valley and Wall Street and could represent a radical departure from longstanding financial networks.